Absalom's Daughters Read Free Page A

Even the driveway went up , vanishing into a forest of lilacs, oak, and hydrangea. Cassie could barely see the house. Judith returned with money in her fist. She held her palm out to Cassie, and Cassie took the hot nickel.
    The transaction felt strange. “Thanks,” said Cassie.
    â€œDon’t tell nobody I’m payin’ a nigger girl.”
    â€œYou say that again, an’ I’m tellin’ everybody you my sister.”
    Judith worked her fist around the handle of the wagon. Her mouth tightened and made a little twist at the edge, not like a smile, not like a reflection of her father. The meaning in the look wasn’t something Cassie could identify.
    â€œAll right,” said Judith.
    This felt strange, like Judith had been waiting for Cassie to say what they were.
    â€œYou swear,” said Cassie.
    â€œI swear.” Judith looked at her. “You think people can tell?”
    â€œOnly if they want to.”
    Judith turned to plod up the rest of the hill.
    *   *   *
    Cassie came home late in the hottest part of the afternoon through the white part of town, past Tawney’s Store, past Beanie Simms’s three shoeshine chairs in front of the barber shop, past Saul’s Grocery, where Mister Saul would wait on white folks in the front and coloreds in the back. She crossed the tracks and made her way to the end of Negro Street, where the front door of the laundry was propped open for whatever breeze there was. Inside, Cassie pushed through the swinging gate in the laundry counter and through a second door, which opened into the tiny kitchen in the back room. An old coal stove took up half the space in the kitchen and got hot enough to warm both rooms upstairs in the winter. There was room for a table with three chairs. Two shelves for dishes and cups fit into the space under the staircase that led up to the second floor.
    The kitchen was blistering: The stove burned high, lined with half a dozen irons, which Cassie would be using after supper to press shirts and trousers. Cassie wiped sweat from under her lip. She opened the back screen door into the small dirt yard. Even the heat of the evening seemed cooler than being inside.
    Grandmother was pinning up the day’s wash—mostly sheets. Bleached and starched, the sheets hung in tight rows. Before Grandmother clipped each sheet to the clothesline, Cassie was supposed to dampen the small dirt yard with a watering can to keep the dust from rising up to grime the clean white seams. Dampening the ground had been Cassie’s job even when she was too little to do much else. Today she had forgotten to do it, so Grandmother probably had. No doubt Cassie would hear about it. Once, when she was six or seven, Beanie Simms had told her that his father had owned the shoeshine chairs before him and had told Beanie Simms when he was a boy that the business would be his one day. The thought that something might be hers when she was grown had struck Cassie—the watering can, the newspaper pictures on the walls upstairs, even the laundry itself—all of it hers. She had asked Grandmother about it, and Grandmother had taken the clothespins out of her mouth and said, “When you have your own child, we’ll go away and raise it in some other place.” When Cassie thought about that conversation later, she was never sure she hadn’t dreamed it, but the force of Grandmother’s reaction had seemed real enough.
    Grandmother shaded her eyes at Cassie and pointed to a pan of yams and a bowl of green beans sitting on the back steps. There was a knife to peel the yams. Cassie sat and took the pan of yams in her lap and slid the knife under the clay-colored skin.
    Grandmother sat next to her. She took up the bowl of beans.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have gone off with that white girl,” said Grandmother. She began snapping the beans, pulling out the tough threads. “You made your mother and me very